According to a recent press release, “Fujitsu R&D Center Co., Ltd. and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced the development of an artificial intelligence model that can generate highly reliable recognition of handwritten character strings. The results of this model represent the world’s highest degree of accuracy in recognizing handwritten Chinese character strings. Recognition of individual handwritten Chinese characters using deep learning and other AI models has already surpassed human recognition capability. When used on strings of handwritten characters, however, issues arise with an inability to correctly break the strings into individual characters. Given this, the new Fujitsu-developed AI model can rank degree of reliability, assigning a high degree of reliability to correct characters, and a low degree of reliability to portions that are not characters, in image recognition for handwritten strings of characters. By applying this model, recognition mistakes in characters have been reduced to less than half that of previous technology, greatly improving the efficiency of tasks such as digitization of handwritten texts.”

The release goes on, “This technology will be used as part of Human Centric AI Zinrai, the Fujitsu AI technology… Character recognition is a field where the utilization of AI promises greater task efficiency. Fujitsu Laboratories has several decades of experience in research and development relating to character recognition, and has a large portfolio of technologies, such as machine translation, in the field of Japanese language processing. In September 2015, using AI technologies modeled on the workings of the human brain, Fujitsu announced its successful demonstration of the world’s first technology with a character recognition rate that exceeded that of a human to recognize individual handwritten Chinese characters. However, Chinese sentences are made up of strings of complex Chinese characters and when an individual character is not clearly distinguishable, such as in a handwritten form, it is difficult to recognize a character accurately.”